Bo Porter says Astros will take ‘huge step forward’

“Once Thanksgiving comes, you start to get the itch a little bit,” the Astros manager said on Astroline on Wednesday. “But when you start to put up the Christmas lights and the Christmas tree … and really start to thinking about packing for spring training, I’ll tell you, that next month and a half rolls by real fast. We are now five weeks to go, and we all have the itch.”

Porter’s out at Minute Maid Park most every day around 9 a.m., with two workout groups coming in and out that includes about 20 players in total, major and minor league. Some members of the coaching staff around, too, as the team gets ready for spring training.

“A lot of sit downs one and one,” Porter said of his time at the office. “Talk their career, talk last year, talk about the upcoming year and expectations.”

Third-base coach turned bench coach Dave Trembley will again coordinate the Astros’ spring training operation: scheduling, workouts, and all the other tremendous logistics. This spring won’t run exactly the same as last year’s, though.

“There will be some things that we’ll address differently,” Porter said. “Any time you go through the course of a season, I’m one of those people that takes a lot of notes. There are some things that we will focus on more this spring that we probably did not focus on last spring. I think our players are at a different point in their baseball careers than they were last year. We had a lot of guys who showed up last year, it was their first major league spring training.”

Overall, Porter was very optimistic that the Astros’ darkest days are behind them.

“What you can look forward to is the fact that from an organizational standpoint, we’ve been through the lows of the lows, and the highs of the highs are right around corner,” Porter said. “The good thing about our high is that we’re going to be on a high for a pretty long time, because we’ve done it the right way.

“I wanted to be able to come to a place where I had an opportunity to actually grow with the organization. I will tell you we are on target, and 2014 will be a huge step forward.”

Porter was asked who is Opening Day starter was, and gave at least a half-wink towards Scott Feldman — by far the most veteran presence in the rotation — but Porter abstained from looking too far ahead.

“I think it’s one of those things where we have a lot of guys that can fill that spot,” Porter said. “Scott Feldman comes in with a lot of experience. But we’ll let that get decided in spring training.”

Here are some more highlights from Porter’s appearance with Milo Hamilton:

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Will Carlos Correa be in big league camp? “That hasn’t been decided yet. It’s something which we’re talking about as an organization. You always start to look at the numbers hone you start to get to how many guys you invite. He’s definitely a guy that will be in Florida early, even if he’s not technically in (big league) spring training, so he will be available to us to use.”

Why don’t you Tweet? “I’m not on Twitter, I’m not on Facebook or any of those there outlets. I kind of just drown myself in the team, the players and what’s going on in front of me. Not even have enough time to divert into the social media frenzy.”

On the difficult AL West: “It’s actually good to be in a tough division when you start to look at the quality of teams in our division and the upgrades the other teams in our division went out and made. It actually makes for good competitive balance. You know that one team isn’t going to run away.”

On first base: “It’s going to be a heated competition. I like the guys that we have. At the end of the day, I believe that the player that ends up winning the first base job will obviously make our lineup and make us a better team.”

On Eduardo Perez’s decision to leave: “It actually came to all of us as a surprise.”